Genius Party gathers many different people with many different talents to create shorts. With Limit Cycle, this is monologues. It’s basically 20 minutes of monologue about religious and philosophical topics. Its director is Hideki Futamura, who isn’t really a big name. He worked on a bunch of the Animatrix shorts, did key animation for movies as Junkers Come Here, Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust and Perfect Blue, and he directed Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. He’s definitely someone with talent, and here he finally gets to prove again what he can do.
In these twenty minutes of nothing but talking however, he makes the classic mistake that you can do with these kinds of shorts: he forgets to put anything into context. What we have right now is some random guy who rambles on about life, death, immortality, religion, et cetera. I just had one question on my mind, though: “what’s the point?” Why is this guy delving into philosophy? What does he want to achieve?
You see, the thing is that right now you have a string of dialogue of a level that even I could have come up with. Just give me enough time to quote a bunch of famous philosophers who talked about life, immortality and religion, and voila! This isn’t intelligent, this is just plain random. I think that what the director should have done is that he should have looked more at good examples, in which endless strings of dialogues and monologues do work. Most notably, if he watched Mamoru Oshii’s short on Twillight Q, or Mouryou no Hako, he would have gotten a good idea of what he needed to do to put some meaning behind these words. And give them impact.
Still, a complete waste of time this isn’t, because thankfully the visuals are utterly gorgeous. Along with Dimension Bomb, Limit Cycle definitely has the best aesthetics of all the shorts of Genius Party, and that has to say something. The compositions, character-designs, use of colours, and filters, all come together wonderfully along with great character-designs. If anything, the images were much more thought-provoking than the dialogue!
Anyway, to wrap up Genius Party: it really was a great opportunity to see so many different talents and styles, together in one package. These compilation movies of different short stories have been there before, but never in this scale, with so many different movies and I can only hope that Studio 4C (or any other studio for that matter) is going to continue making more of these, because I really enjoyed sitting through even the lesser ones.
As for my favourite ones, my top three consists of Dimension Bomb, Toujin Kit and Baby Blue. These three are definite works of art and really succeeded in what they set out to do. The other shorts also all have their own merits in their own single way.
| Storytelling: | 7/10 |
| Characters: | 6/10 |
| Production-Values: | 9/10 |
| Setting: | 7/10 |
What bothered me about this one, as a trained philosopher and literary critic, is that there was no argument to his dialogue, just literally rambling on several topics loosely tied together. Sometimes he even contradicted himself, and not in a meaningful way, like Derrida or Heidegger, who use contradictions to point to something else. At the end, I was so confused by what he was even trying to convey that any power the imagery had was wasted because I had to focus so hard on the monologue in order to not just drift off. It might actually be an improvement to rip the audio from this one, lay some techno on top of it, and just watch the pretty colors.
I think the short deals more with limit cycles and deterministic chaos than the philosophic and religious talk. Not that I claim to understand the context.
After reaching the half way mark, my threshold, and reaching the conclusion that there undoubtably is no cohesive logic, I assumed there had to be logic in reflection.
my interpretations started as a reflection on the hierarchy of content where god claimed prominence. I thought that the aimless stream of consciousness was a communication method allowing for viewers to formulate the presented patchwork logic into something they could understand and believe much like religion or the idea of god – connecting dots/ideas or things without meaning and forming meaning.
My other interpretation was that this stream of consciousness is a mode of reflection before suicide. Presenting the minds thoughts as encrypted unstable logic as affirmation to conclude the characters life. There were scenes that could support this idea and perhaps the title.
Perhaps schizophrenia is another option ( wouldn’t it be awful if your vision to communicate a complex series of logic was dismissed as trying to communicate schizophrenia 🙂
Ever interpretable perhaps? sounds like reality and varying ideas of life and truth. – poetry snaps –
Or perhaps an attempt at something intellectual for intellectual’s sake.
there is fucking logic in, you just have to get high as fuck HOLY SHIT
Here the less philosophical way of looking at it more then just saying what it is too. I am a big philosopher but meaning that the representation is telling us is that there is a god-like person limiting himself from becoming irrational and stabilizing himself with both himself and god. He tries to find the unseen god with trying to represent himself out to be one (hence the glasses meaning “limit cycle”). There are many background meanings when you look for them. I understanding the random hypocritical aspect and yet see no hypocritical aspect and only see contridictions to prove what life cycle means even after death or before it. He does throw some philosophical meanings but he is trying to get to the truth without becoming schizophrenic. He is also determining the reason for our choices and what they are made of. Very sketchy and very sensitive since sympathy runs the left side of our brain and our consciousness move all around our head whilst leaving our subconscious every few seconds which in turn leaves the lightbulb effect all around our head. since we cannot keep our conscious thoughts to ourselves for no longer then 10 minutes. It is nice to see fresh ideas come from the blue is all ^.^
After dissecting the video multiple times, I realize there is a reference point for an argument underlying the difficulty of knowing all things. “They do not know I am judging them by my own watch” it is a statement revealed after seeing him look at his watch. “I can know not of everything but know many who know of it”. The anime short seems to slip over many people’s heads because of how unsupervised the contradictive arguments become. The arguments are based off of human assumption on both how straining and relaxing self-assumption is different among other people. He discovers that if you try certain subjects to pass judgment of the assumption that God himself cannot be seen because it is a fallacy. He explains how haphazardness drives our accord to become truthful with ourselves before God himself mistakes himself to be lesser then a god that cannot exist. Emotionally, he tries to separate himself to provide certainty to himself that one thing that provides cannot be opposite of something that cannot provide. Himself provides answers even when he is far away from a god.
I see a lot of people claiming they “get it” through repeated watching and analysis. That’s exactly the intended effect of spiritual nonsense. It spurs you on with a desire to look smart, that there is something out there which is vital, profound, secret; something you can’t see or understand yet. Everybody has that urge, that insecurity. Then you let the viewer’s pareidolia do the rest. Anyone can find patterns and meaning in meaningless noise if they really try. Everyone considers themselves a philosopher, but that doesn’t prove or change anything in a reliable way. It’s not useful.
It reminds me a lot of Deepak Chopra’s pseudo-spiritual quackery. I don’t think there is meaning here, and if there was the author purposefully made it too obscure to reliably and accurately piece together. All you have is people’s pointless interpretations. It’s a neat little carnival trick, but you can make anything seem deep and spiritual and immensely cerebral by doing this. It’s lazy. Here our protagonist is this arrogant, self-impressed man who thinks he sees the truth of the universe because of the complicated way he talks, quoting bits of scripture out of context. I can’t stand that.
The visuals sure are amazing though. I just turn the subtitles off, enjoy listening to a person’s voice in a language I don’t understand with the pretty pictures. That’s as good as anything. You don’t need some profound, deep truth.
I know it’s been a number of years…. but has anyone tried typing out the poem and reading the lines in the reverse order? (i found something cool)